Christie Trexel, 26, who sells Cameo lingerie at home parties, was at a weekend sales convention in Dallas when she got word to hurry home to Cherokee, Iowa. Last Tuesday she and her husband Donald, 39, called their five-year-old son Joe in Omaha to tell him that he and his year-old brother Phillip would have to prolong a visit with their grandmother. The next day Christie and Donald flew to Wilmington, N.C., with an Army reserve unit called to active port-security duty, leaving family and friends to harvest the corn and soybeans from their 200-acre farm in October.
It is unusual...